excerpted from N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 225-228. See the book for footnote references.

    With regard to the will to power contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has diffused yet another major misunderstanding of Nietzsche's philosophy; and it has given us yet another reason to reject the thesis that Nietzsche proposes some form of spiritual Titanism. The will to power is not an individual, egoistic will but it is the life force itself, described by Graham Parkes as "the matrix of forces that animate all sentient beings."This interpretation is supported by Nietzsche's statement that the will to power is not simply the self's "desiring" or "commanding," but nature's "fundamental will stands revealed" in its "total organic process."He makes the provocative charge that the "will of psychology. . . . does not exist at all," and that our grammar has seduced us into thinking that there must be a subject to the will in itself. If the will to power is the life force, then the grammatical mistake is clear when we ask the absurd question: does life itself have a will to live?

    With this interpretation of the will to power before us, comparisons to Chinese philosophy are much more apt and instructive. Roger Ames has done one of the most insightful studies, focusing on the the Daoist de and the will to power. Ames proposes that the relationship of de and dao is one in which the Dao is like a field of creative energy out of which its particular manifestations arise as many de. An instructive Western parallel would be Whitehead's actual occasions arising out of what he called "creativity." Ames' description of Daoist ontology as hylozoistic is also compatible with Whitehead's view that actual occasions are psychophysical unities. Nietzsche and the Daoists, however, are metaphysically closer, because they reject the idea that there are universals (Whitehead calls them "eternal objects") by which the creative field is structured and ordered. (A focus on Zhuangzi's tian li--Heaven's structuring--may bring him clsoer to Whitehead.) This ontological pluralism supports the perspectivism that we find in Nietzsche and Zhuangzi. The principal difference is that the Daoist sage can, as we have seen, transcend all perspectives and attain a state of illumination of the Dao as a whole. The Daoist would disagree with Zarathustra's "Daoism": "'This is my way; where is yours?' thus I answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way--that does not exist."Both the Confucians and the Daoists believe in the way, a single, broad path that has, as Herbert Fingerette has astutely observed, has no crossroads.

    While Ames overlooks this significant difference, he nevertheless succeeds with his most insightful point: the creative potential in both de and the will to power allows the Daoists and Nietzsche to see person-making and self-transformation as a creative art form. As Ames explains: "The weight of the Daoist discussion tends to be cosmological, not in the abstract sense of 'a science of first principles,' but in the aesthetic sense of ars contextualis, 'the art of contextualization' or 'composition.'"(Ames observes that the Confucians share this aesthetic cosmology and I will argue later that their version of it should be preferred.) Daoist and Nietzschean self-transformation requires a world in which all substances--including an immutable soul and an eternal God--are eliminated. The Daoists would agree with Zarathustra's claim that "it is of time and becoming that the best parables should speak: let them be a praise and a justification of all impermanence."(Permanent substance, says Nietzsche, is an empty fiction, invented by pure reason.) This radical process philosophy allows for the actualization of innumerable identities (recall that Huzi had a new "self" everytime Jixian visited), which Nietzsche described as "a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general." In The Twilight of the Idols the Dionysian is described as being able to enter "into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself."

    Zarathustra also proclaims: "I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me."Self-overcoming is of course self-transformation, and Zarathustra has carried to the mountains the ashes of the conventional self that he has destroyed. There he has fashioned a new self: "How could you want to become new without first becoming ashes." Like the Daoist sage whose self has become "daemonic," so has Zarathustra's self attained a "brighter flame" for itself. (This is the closest the Übermensch comes to divinity: just as the Daoist sage is filled with shen so is the Overman the supreme embodiment of the will to power.) And just as the Daoist sage rejects the superstitions of gui, so too is Zarathustra freed from the ghosts of popular religion.

    Much of Daoist imagery and mythology is based on life in mountain wildernesses far from the cities and farms of the plains. The dog deity Panhu onced helped emperor Gauxin win a military victory and Gauxin gave him his youngest daughter in marriage. Panhu took her to the mountains where she gave birth to twelve children, who learned the language of animals and who "disliked level land." One of course is reminded of Zarathustra's missionary failures in the villages of the plain--they found him "wild and strange"--and his preference for his mountain cave and his animal friends, particularly the eagle and serpent, with whom he feels more safe than with humankind.

    The mountains are also a place where one can accumulate one's de--one's will to power--so that one can recapture the fullness of de one had as a child. (Those who live in the mountains do not eat the five grains, a diet that dissipates de rather than preserves it.) The way of the sage is also crooked like a mountain path rather than straight like a city street, a moral code, or a Mohist argument. In Chapter Four of the Zhuangzi the madman of Chu yells out to Confucius: "Leave off, leave off--this teaching men virtue! Dangerous, dangerous--to mark off the ground and run! Fool, fool--don't spoil my walking! I walk a crooked way--don't step on my feet."Zarathustra also says that "all good things approach their goal crookedly. . . all good things laugh."One of the higher men says that Zarathustra is the evidence for the truth that the sage walks "on the most crooked ways."